Good Life without Happiness

Abstract

A good life combines lively living and a good purpose, which depend on action results and consequences. They supervene upon the action results that create life’s meaning. A good life is never evil because evil deeds, as such, are not part of the agent’s action repertoire. Agents cannot claim them as their own; if they do, dishonest hypocrisy and social stigmatization follow. But, when action results are good, the purpose is good, too. One cannot realize an evil purpose by acting morally. I argue against the idea that a passive, dreaming life could be a good life. I discuss specific kinds of religious life that follow a monastic rule. A good life may not be happy, although it tends to be so. I discuss various theories of happiness, including the traditional Socratic view that virtue and virtue only make an agent happy. I conclude that a good life is not the same as a virtuous life; hence, a good life can be unhappy. To conclude, I discuss personal autonomy in social life. A good life requires that one’s actions and goals are one’s own, but such ownership is hard to realize because of a social life’s complicated and demanding mutual dependencies. I conclude that full ownership is fiction, so a good life is a social life.